Oolite Bulletins

... I mean - it's gon about 8x the volume of the mark1 and only twice the cargo. Compare the model with the anaconda... the wingspan of one is comparable with the length of the other.

I've been having fun with the ship models.
I've put some experiments up:

http://www.hbclinux.net.nz/oolite.html

I'm quite pleased with the typhoon and the viper III there. But I need to work on the typhoon skins.

The typhoon is my python replacement. So the basic ship is the same spec. But there are mods, which would suit the python too so it's all good.

1. Coyote: Blockade Runner - small cargo (60TC) and armament, better default sheilds and more speed. But hey, there is the economics of a supercobra there at a fraction the buy-in price.

2. Cougar: Gunship - good cargo and better weaponry. Particularly missiles. With the fuel pod, this provides a long range. May travel escourt with the oversize ships like the Anaconda Class Cruiser.

3. Cruiser: Military spec - extra engine, and a modified hull. Faster and heavily armed - but expensive. The military issue may have it's own escorts.

Hi SB - sizes of ships v cargo capacity is an ongoing musing/issue within Oolite - especially if you consider the apocryphal but canonical 750T capacity of the Anaconda (I read an interview with DB and IB once where they admitted a bit of a smudge on a piece of paper changed 150T to 750T and it was included in the Flight manual before anybody noticed.

To justify the tonnage issues between Cobby Mk1 and Cobby Mk3 think of this - Cobby Mk 3 is faster (bigger engines), has more energy banks, can have a crew of two therefore bigger cockpit/sleep quarters, carries more missiles (and there is still a debate whether missiles are external or internal - personnally I prefer the idea that they're internal - why advertise the fact that you've only got one - or worse - none - missiles left). Add to this the potential for improved safety features (due to change in regs between the two ships being manufactured - if you want to add some "realism") and it all takes up internal volume, the Cobby MK3 can have an enormous amount of additional equipment fitted - all these potential mounting points (internal or external) will still chip away at the volume set aside for cargo...

HTH

DH

Hi Simon B and welcome to the Oolite Univers

Like the rest of us you seem to be well and truly hooked with this brilliant version of the original game.

I noticed the download link on your site was for Oolite 1.65, this should be updated to the latest 1.71 version which is stable, there are so many more goodies in it and not all the OXP's will work on 1.65

Looking at Simon's posts in other threads - he has been using 1.69 and 1.71...

I originally installed 1.6-whatever it is for Ubuntu to try it out - since it was just a:

sudo apt-get install oolite.

1.7 series got installed a few weeks ago on my desktop because I wanted to look at the tianve pulsar - lame I know.

I noticed two puzzling changes in the upcrade -
1. collision boxes got bigger or more sensitive or something
2. oxps are no longer reloaded each time

That second one had me tearing my hair out - why weren't my changes having any effect?! I discovered I had to remove the oxp, start oolite, exit oolite, add the oxp, start oolite, to see the changes.

So, it the back of my mind I'm thinking perhaps some sort of development rig for testing the ships... it needs to allow flying around and looking through the views.


I note, on the size of the cobra3, you get to almost double the cargo bay by knocking out some girders. Considering the size discussion - no wonder.

I grok that stuff about other changes that can affect internal space. Also - this is a fantasy game - there's no relativity, motion is pre-galilean, the speed of light is infinite, and there is FTL. A bit of fudging over the ship sizes is not really so bad.

It's just that when you get double dimensions with double capacity - it looks like somebody didn't think it through. It's a very common mistake.

(heh... have you tried watching the Longshot dock, from an outside view? Bits of it pass through the walls of the station... that's an awesome design, but the model needs to be about 1/2-2/3rds the size?)

Still, it is good to establish some guidelines...

eg. The shuttle is round-about adder size and shares a role. But it gets 30TC cargo to the adder's 2. The difference is - witchdrive. The engines and additional fuel eat up 18TC.

The ships seem reasonably consistent in each class... the small ships are all about the same size, aspii is bigger, but also the fastest and it has witchdrives. Similarly, the cargo ships look OK - though the anaconda would work if it was more square.

The oxp ships seem to be more about providing cooler ships with nicer features. There's exceptions I know but there are very few additional tradeoffs.

I'll show you what I mean in the next few days - I'll add the "Arachnid" to my Oolite page. This is a spindly pontoon ship, big engines and very fast... lightly armed and armored, carrying 7TC. Thing is, it doesn't exactly stop on a dime.

Strong thrusters are not desirable due to frame stresses - it's designed to look cool for rich kids to cruise around the spaceways in. The cap is so you can fit a birth and still speculate commodities.

The idea is that the model has to look nasty enough that the player wants to have one...

Hey - if I can work out anything remotely consistent... GURPS Oolite anyone?

BTW: good tip on the link... fixing.

Simon B wrote:

I noticed two puzzling changes in the upcrade -
1. collision boxes got bigger or more sensitive or something
2. oxps are no longer reloaded each time

That second one had me tearing my hair out - why weren't my changes having any effect?! I discovered I had to remove the oxp, start oolite, exit oolite, add the oxp, start oolite, to see the changes.

I have also noticed number 1, especially so in the upcoming version. I think this is one of the things that has to be looked at before release. I am not sure at all what was the change that made this happen, though.

As for number 2, the "correct" way to get the game to understand your changes (i.e. rebuild its cache) is to hold Shift while starting up the app. For some reason, this does not seem to work as intended on Linux and I would be grateful if anyone could come up with a patch that fixes it. For Windows, I had to resort to Win32 API specific calls to get it to work.

@A_C - Holding down the shift key seems to work OK in Ubuntu...

From what I've seen when I was testing on Windows the Shift checking code that currently runs on Linux, it worked only if you pressed Shift at a very specific moment during startup and you had to be quite lucky to get that moment right. If my memory serves me well (and that can be a big if), I have seen similar behaviour being reported here by other users running Linux, but if it has been resolved in Ubuntu, then I guess it might just have to do with the way the SDL library handles keyboard input. Maybe recent Ubuntu versions use a version of the library earlier than 1.2.11?

Hah - thanks for that - I'll have to test... must go now, dinner calls.
Wedding annaversery tomorrow - doubt I'll get to spend it in the ooniverse.

I have uploaded the arachnid oxp (tarballed) and images to my oolite page. Including an impractical but fancy HUD. I't a lux ship after all...

[image removed]

Probably should start new threads for this...

*Arachnid*
Havn't managed to get the fwd laser to fire from the arachnid nose - it always appears from just outside the front points. No matter what.

I'm guessing I need to make the pontoons separate models. This should be a matter of loop-cutting the struts but leaving them in place. That way the sub-object should be placed in (0,0,0).

*Military Anaconda*
Taking the ball turrets from the behemoth, I should be able to do this:
To understand the placement, you need to realise that the "anaconda-cc" I have is different from what you guys know and love. They'll get posted later - it's basically a long brick.

My main issue is wether I'll end up in trouble with the quarternions... which I'm guessing is what the last four numbers in the ballturret strings are.

If you think of the ship being shaped like a person lying on their stomach - head to the bow - then the turrets are:
1: in the small of the back
2: under the chin
3&4: on the hips
... have I got them facing the right way?

(to test - I need to impliment it, then wait to meet one... is there a better way? suggestions please.)

I have put the cougar and the typhoon-cruiser (basically modded pythons) escorts... is this sane? Both ships are well armed and I wanted a small number of large ships to form a battle-group.

The next issue will be if I need a special AI. This is not intended to be a player ship. (How would you turret a player ship?)

*tourist/hich-hiker*
Out of all the suggestions, this has emerged as "popular" - my scripting experience is non existent. I want to get ships down pat first... so if anyone wants to take this up, you are welcome... keep me posted.

Here's another suggestion - re: escape capsules

*Insurance Payout*
The ship you end up with after escaping is just the one you escaped from, with damage it had at the time.

How about - insurance pays the local-station trade-in value of your ship in Credits and leaves you in the local station to buy a ship with it?

If the game requires there to be always a ship - then you get a Worm, with the balance as Credits.

This means - yes - if you had a poor ship you'll be unable to buy another one with the shipyard mark-down. However, most people should be able to afford, at least, an adder.

*Adderbuntu* - the starship for humans - actually I've done this one.
One of the first things I did was re-skin the adders... a rainbow of them with a snakeskin paintjob. Included adderbuntu, an elite transport, and an Umbrella Corp fast adder (aft military laser and a quirium cascade mine).

*Tux Class Ships*
These ships are fast, cheap, with endless variety ... but they can only be serviced, and parts obtained, from anarchist systems.

For that matter - this is a way to make some system specific ships available to a player - i.e. give a commie ship a HUD labelled with cryllic text, and slogans, which can only be serviced in commie systems.

Simon B wrote:

2. Cougar: Gunship - good cargo and better weaponry. Particularly missiles. With the fuel pod, this provides a long range. May travel escourt with the oversize ships like the Anaconda Class Cruiser.

Please note that there already exists a ship named Cougar.

Commander McLane wrote:

Please note that there already exists a ship named Cougar.

Always willing to be informed...

That link points to a wiki stub for a ship called "Cat" which comes in the "oldships" oxp. I got that - where do you get "cougar"?

Anyway, nobody need take the names I use. I think the names I use are the least of my problems... I just need to remember to check the contents of oxps before I load them.

The cougar referred to here is in the typhoon oxp on my site. I think the shipdata.plist calls it "typhoon-cougar" or "typhoon-cg" depending.

After calling the blockade runner "coyote" I wanted an american animal which had a butch rep. I wanted something like "jaguar" but "cougar" fit the bill.

Can you see anything substantially wrong with the planned ship? Like the quarternions? Any advice on how to test the ship?

Great looking ship

Simon B wrote:

Commander McLane wrote:

Please note that there already exists a ship named Cougar.

That link points to a wiki stub for a ship called "Cat" which comes in the "oldships" oxp. I got that - where do you get "cougar"?

It's called "Cat (Cougar)", at least in the ship list, and "Cat Mark I (Cougar)" above the screenshot in the infobox.

I am quite certain there is a story behind it. If I'm not mistaken oldships.oxp contains ships that appeared in certain Elite-versions only. Look [url=ttp://oldsat.alioth.net/node/21]here[/url] for a little more information. It seems that "Cougar" was an alternative name for the "Cat" (probably on one platform it was "Cat", on the other it was "Cougar"?).

TGHC wrote:

Great looking ship :)

Nice ... which one?

By context - the typhoon... which OXP is due an upgrade soon. The one currently up has an unused skin to encorporate and I want to get rid of the "likeship" so it can stand alone.

In responce to the critique on the name - the class will be called "Typhoon" with nicknamed versions starting with a "T" thus:

Typhoon Class "Appaloosa" Free Trader (T Appaloosa)
Typhoon Class "Coyote" Blockade Runner (T Coyote)
Typhoon Class "Cougar" Frontier Trader (T Cougar)
Typhoon Class "Noseoid*" Cruiser (T Cruiser)

*Nickname needed... preferably to fit the theme. (Though using ooniverse animals is an intreguing idea...)

The cougar and cruiser to have military varients. Coyote to have a high-tech only ultra-fast version. (Star Runner?)

***
Note - I have completed my experiment on multi-model ships with the Tuatara, and the OXP will be posted soon.

Tuatara has two models, the main body, which has it's own small engines, and two large pontoons with BMF Engines. I've chosen to give lots of thrust, and twitchy maneuverability, but not a lot of extra speed - maybe the engines are low tech? Think of it as a heavy fighter.

*** Is there an existing frangible ship someplace? ***
I wanted to make the Tuatara frangible, so you could blow it up in three bits. Maybe script a spin if one pontoon gets destroyed, and a player action to jettison pontoons maybe? (Does this sound doable to you guys?)

The trouble is that I need the exhaust to go away when an engine is blown off. I tried just adding the exhaust to the engine model in the shipdata.plist - but it didn't render. I'm guessing you cannot have subsystems of subsystems - which would be sane-ish.

So, say, a jettison action would have to change the whole model assigned to the player to be the life-section only. With two pontoons, dead, floating off at angles.

I'd also need (death?) actions for the cases where one or other engine is the first to go or the main section goes. If the first two, I need another action for the next destroyed model.

I'll have to modify my cobra4 and the arachnid to use multi-models, since this is solving my aesthetic - lets have the laser fire from the hull - problem.

Having done two dual-pontoon ships - I figure I've got a bead on how to do a berserker:

I have noticed that NPCs can get more than one laser to a facing if they are using multi-models. (Don't see how this could work with a player. )

A single ship is excessively dangerous if it has more than 2 weapons on each facing. I'm thinking 3-6... I can use a cluster of legs like a starfish wrapping prey. (So I only need one model repeated.) I can use the traditional SF spot of light for a power supply/engine, and little red balls for missiles. Make it frangible so it's fun to blow up.

So, if I give it three forward military lasers, and a collection of ECM hardened missiles? (Nukes?) And script carefully - it shows up and attacks everything!

Now ... what does it take to destroy a station?

***
On other things - I have successfully created my own ooniverse by replacing all the ships with my own models. I could put together all the ships under different names for others... interest?